If you haven’t been a part of the “Flash is dead / HTML5 is too young” debate lately, here’s a primer: Adobe’s long-held multimedia dominance of the Web is on the decline. Sure, in some cases, such as video playback, Flash isn’t bad at all, but with mobile compatibility in the dustbin, there’s no doubt that the end is near. The question is: when?
Wix, the long reigning king of website builders with a massive 20 million users, created an empire atop Flash. Recently, the company has dipped its toes into HTML5 with mobile site creation, and today the company is going one step further.
That’s right, Wix is officially diving into the deep end with HTML5 for its brand new website builder. The new release comes with much of the original Flash builder’s functionality, packed into a more flexible technology as mobile web browsing continues to grow.
As far as aesthetics go, there’s never going to be a magic cure for bad taste. To balance choice and quality, Wix does an impressive job maintaining diverse themes to help nudge users in the right direction. Furthermore, the actual product automatically maintains consistency amongst styles to keep things like fonts compatible throughout an entire site. This means there’s a lot of potential here for impressive results.
The idea of drag-and-drop site creation is an interesting topic for web designers, but Wix isn’t out to replace the job of creative professionals. Instead, the company targets less-experienced users (often with small budgets) and provides them with tools to help make the most out of their online presence. It’s an important and difficult role to play.
From Avishai Abrahami, Wix’ CEO and Co-founder:
The web is a highly dynamic sphere where business opportunities are endless. As new technologies are introduced and internet consumption evolves, Wix was able to build a HTML5 product that uses the full capabilities of current web browsers.
With our new HTML5 product, we empower our users with the ability to create content that they want and infuse their personality into their online presence, while maintaining the same easy-to-use, high quality and visually stunning aspect users have grown accustomed to with Wix.com.
If you’re still rooting for Flash, note that Wix isn’t abandoning its founding technology. For the foreseeable future, the company is keeping both options and really seems to value user choice.
What’s important is that this change doesn’t actually alter Wix’s recipe for success. In fact, many users won’t realize that they are using a slightly more future-proof technology (not that anything on the web or in tech is truly future-proof). With an HTML5 push comes a new generation of Wix sites to flood the web.
You can visit Wix via the link below. Also, feel free to share your site-builder experiences with us in the comments!
For more post-Flash, check out Adobe Edge, which embraces JavaScript, CSS3 and HTML5.
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